Hot under the collar: Challenging the EPA

The talking heads in Texas are in an uproar about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health.

On Feb. 16, two months after the EPA released the Endangerment Finding and after the comment period closed, Gov. Rick Perry, Attorney General Greg Abbott and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples announced that Texas is filing a petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals challenging the finding. Perry, Abbott and other Republicans see the ruling as an open door for the government to curb mobile and stationary sources of greenhouse gases, and are circling the wagons on behalf of Texas energy and agriculture.

The same day, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued statements from Chairman Bryan Shaw and Commissioner Buddy Garcia, both criticizing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s use of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC found itself at the center of the maelstrom involving e-mails from one of the participating research institutions that skeptics have said point to withholding scientific data to prove that climate change is, among other things, occurring, and man-made.

“I believe the EPA Endangerment Finding is fundamentally flawed, and I have serious problems with the process underlying EPA’s action and the harmful implications it will have on the lives of Texans and the Texas economy,” Garcia said.

Shaw voiced similar concerns.

“The EPA administrator has in effect outsourced the assessment of the causal relationship between (greenhouse gases) and the earth’s temperature,” Shaw said. “This decision hides from public view the information her decision is based on.”

Some conservative think tanks have also assailed the decision and promised to file an appeal, richly accusing the EPA of politicizing climate change.

The private sector was not far behind. ConocoPhillips, BP America Inc. and Caterpillar Inc. pulled out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a consortium of businesses and environmental groups formed in 2007 to lobby quick action in Washington to develop laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“House climate legislation and Senate proposals to date have disadvantaged the transportation sector and its consumers, left domestic refineries unfairly penalized versus international competition and ignored the critical role that natural gas can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” ConocoPhillips Chairman and CEO Jim Mulva said in a statement. “We believe greater attention and resources need to be dedicated to reversing these missed opportunities and our actions today are part of that effort.”

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the aforementioned think tanks, said that BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar “are recognizing that cap-and-trade legislation is dead in the U.S. Congress and that global warming alarmism is collapsing rapidly. "

Not to be outdone, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn is holding a press conference in Houston on Feb. 18 to release information on the effects of federal climate change legislation on the Texas economy compiled by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, another think tank.

“Texas has now taken a leading position against the EPA’s ill-advised findings on the dangers of greenhouse gases,” said Faulk, who attended the utterly uneventful United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen late last year.

Among a flurry of terse, scolding statements issued to the press this week, Faulk was one of the few to actually elaborate.

“Under the law, ‘endangerment’ findings are only proper when the EPA independently determines that ensuing regulations can substantially mitigate the offending conditions,” he said. “Here, no regulations the U.S. unilaterally adopts can possibly reverse global warming by themselves. Their impact on the global climate will be minimal, especially when China, India and other major emitters continue to release gases without any restrictions.”

Faulk said the EPA’s rush to regulate and subsequent deferral to the United Nation's assessment without critical assessment should cause the agency to back up and find another objective and independent evaluation of the science.

“If it fails to do so, today’s announcement will likely be just the first issued from many other state capitols, which will ultimately expose these and other fatal flaws in EPA policy in the Court of Appeals,” Faulk said.